The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  Every time I open a letter from my mother I can hear her calling me across the ocean: Can you help me? Can we all go back home, be together again? Can you help me find the key? She will ask me that until she dies. While she keeps looking for the keys to her lost home, I keep looking for the meaning of all those bones. Will my future always be determined by someone else’s needs?

  In late January, Ristiina invites us to Finland to see her aunt, who she says is a great storyteller. William likes Ristiina a lot and I can tell that he tries really hard to be in a better mood when she is around. She is the reason why we have a washing machine, an oven, and just about everything else. I would never have gotten so deeply involved in Sámi society without her. She sets people at ease so they open up and tell me stories: folktales, stories about the war or supernatural beings, family histories, anything they feel comfortable talking to me about.

  When she stops by to pick us up, Ristiina says that we can go to an ice hotel for coffee on our way to Finland if we like. She had taken William and me to one once before. Everything was made of ice—chairs, tables, walls, and bed. But at the last minute, William says he doesn’t want to go. Ristiina goes back out to the car to let us work things out between us. I’ve told her a little about his mood swings.

  “Okay,” I say. “Get some good work done and don’t worry about dinner.”

  “You’re still going?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I can’t believe you’d go without me. I just can’t believe it.”

  “It’ll be nice for you to have some time alone,” I say.

  “Nice for you, you mean.”

  “I’ll try to be back by dinnertime, but I can’t promise.”

  “You can’t promise anything, can you?”

  William follows me to the door. “I wanted to make love this morning but you had gone for a walk. Alone.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know.”

  “Well. Now you do.”

  I stand on my toes to kiss him but he turns his face so that my mouth kisses air.

  In Finland, Ristiina and I sit by the fire while her aunt tells me stories. It’s twilight when we start to drive back from the Finish border. We are quiet for a while, then Ristiina asks, “Is your guoibme okay? I haven’t seen him in town lately. Is he sick?”

  “He’s getting more depressed. I’m not sure what’s wrong, to tell you the truth.”

  “He’ll cheer up when there’s more light,” says Ristiina.

  Suddenly I hear the la la la lo lo of a yoik, the chantlike poetry-song of the Sámi, coming from someone walking out on the tundra, but it’s too dark to see a soul. It sounds like a baby crying, somewhere in the thickening fog. It sounds like the little boy we found in the snow. Ristiina slows to a complete stop, turns to me, and whispers, “Gula! Gula!”

  “Listen to what?”

  “Something bad happened here.”

  “Where?”

  Ristiina shows me a spot in the landscape that, to me, looks like any other. “That’s where my aunt saw the eahparaš. There.”

  The eahparaš are the forgotten ghost babies of the tundra, children abandoned by their parents, due to poverty or some kind of family scandal.

  “Their spirits cry because they’re left outside to die,” says Ristiina. “They wander the earth until they are given a proper name.”

  Ristiina says a family lived in a farmhouse on the land. The family was happy until the woman’s first husband died, after which she married another man. The man got his stepdaughter pregnant when she was thirteen. After she had the baby, he took the newborn and strangled it. He secretly buried the child in front of their house.

  “Nobody knew,” says Ristiina, “until one day when my aunt was out driving. She heard a baby crying. She looked out her rearview mirror and saw a naked infant crawling across the road, disappearing into a bush.”

  It was twenty degrees below that night. Ristiina’s aunt knew that it had to be an eahparaš. “No human baby could survive naked like that in the snow. My aunt, she knew something really bad happened at that place.”

  Ristiina tells me that her aunt called the police and they investigated the matter. Should I call the police about the woman upstairs? Sometimes she leaves her children home alone for a day or two at a time. The oldest is only twelve. And when she’s home she has loud parties that go on until morning. William and I can hear the children crying and loud fights. How much should we get involved?

  “The stepfather confessed,” says Ristiina. “He took the police to where he had buried the child.” She says the child was hidden in the exact spot where her aunt had seen the apparition. The authorities put the man in prison and the family moved away. If I call the police on the woman upstairs, will they take her children away? Will they split them up? My biggest fear when I was young was that someone would find out about our mother and take me away from my sister. As Ristiina starts the car up to head back home, she says, “My aunt and I hear that baby every time we pass this place.”

  When I return home, I don’t invite Ristiina in, which would be the Sámi thing to do. I should offer her coffee, let her warm up a little from our trip, but I say good night and trudge up the walk to our door. Thankfully, I have remembered my key. The last couple weeks, William has been locking our door, which no one does around here. He can’t handle guests, and in this town people drop by uninvited, sometimes late at night.

  The apartment is pitch-black. I get that feeling I used to get when I’d come home from school and see my mother, sitting in the dark, the shades drawn, a lit cigarette in her hand. I switch on the living room light and follow a whimpering sound coming from the bedroom. It sounds like the ghost baby Ristiina and I had heard on the road and at first I think it is William, joking around. But then I see him curled up in a fetal position on the bed.

  “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  He starts to moan.

  “What’s going on?”

  William yanks the covers over his head and tosses frantically beneath them. All of a sudden he lets out a sharp cry, like an animal that has just been shot. He starts to sob. Upstairs, another party is just getting started. I can feel the stereo’s bass thumping in my bones. Someone throws something heavy on to the floor. A man is laughing, then shouting, something made of glass shatters, a child cries out. William moans again.

  “Stop it,” I say. “I can’t stand this.”

  He throws off the covers, sits up, and spews a stream of nonsense words and phrases, as if in a trance. William sounds like the patients in my mother’s psych ward. He goes on for several minutes, then, just as suddenly, quiets down. The noise continues upstairs.

  “What is going on?” I ask. “Talk to me.”

  William says in a flat voice, “I can’t talk about it. I’m not allowed.”

  “Not allowed?”

  “I can’t tell you what’s wrong. There’s a gag rule.”

  “A gag rule? What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t say anything. You won’t talk to me.”

  “I’m talking to you now.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re judging me.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You left me this morning. You met someone. Who was it?”

  “Christ, what is your problem?” I say. “I feel like I’m in prison.”

  “I am not the oppressor, you are.”

  I slam the bedroom door and go into the large closet off the kitchen that serves as my office. I check my calendar. It has been filled with little black dots for weeks where I marked down William’s foul moods. The month before, sixteen days out of thirty had been horrendous, the rest had been like being around Stállu, who can transform into an unbearable dark weight at the bottom of a boat.

  I go back to the bedroom. “I’m going out. Don’t wait up.”

  “Where? Who are you going to meet? You can’t leave me!”

  Who are your associates? Is that sperm on your leg? Did a man touch y
ou there? Does your sister sleep with the mob?

  “I am going out,” I say. “Alone. I can’t breathe in here.”

  “If you go—if you go I’ll...”

  If you go I’ll kill myself! Someone is going to kidnap you out there!

  I shut the door and walk out. I wander around outside for an hour or so, then make my way over to Kru’s Pub. It’s way below zero and I’ve forgotten my long johns; my legs are turning numb. Since William and I have been together I have paid for just about everything. I am beginning to wonder if he is seriously ill. What if he won’t get a job when we get back to the States? My sister had warned me that William could be trouble. What if he needs full-time care?

  I stare at the red tablecloth, my cup of red hibiscus tea, a piece of cake on a bright red napkin. Everything looks blood-red, the color from my dream last night. I was trying to wash out my blood from my mother’s dress, then her dress transformed into William’s shirt in my hands. No matter how far I go, I spin around at the slightest noise, thinking I will see her there, her hair wild as grass, begging me for the keys. Now I spin around whenever William enters the room.

  In February, the aurora borealis swirls above the tundra and town nearly every night. There is electricity in the air, there are sudden snowstorms in the middle of brilliant, clear days. The sun stays longer in the sky and radiant clouds appear out of nowhere, within each cloud a rainbow. I remember what Ristiina said about the light and hope that maybe the sun will help William’s moods. At the post office, a letter my mother wrote in late autumn has finally arrived.

  Dear Daughter,

  No, the burnt chair was not caused by smoking. That was arson. Enough said. Some people would love to sell my birthright but I tell you this: The Wolf is in my house. No disclosures as yet. Offhand, I can’t think of anyone in the world to trust. It appears to be a new ballgame. A little bird told me they even bid on stolen letters. On a brighter note, I have started to look at art again. I thought of you on a recent visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art. I had never noticed before the feet of “The Thinker” were blown off and there was blood in the bed of a famous nude lady. I am still going blind. A white cane means blindness. I sweat it out but can wait no longer. I need my keys. Please come home immediately. They still send up gas from below, but I now possess information that can incriminate them.

  Mother

  When I return to the house, William is peacefully writing at his desk. He smiles when I come in and gets up to hug me. We’ve been getting along for five days in a row and I’m starting to think that maybe things aren’t so bad. We’ve been talking again about creative projects we want to do together when we get back to the States. Maybe I’ve been too harsh. The extremities of this place would be hard on anyone. During early polar expeditions, didn’t icebound crews get “wind sickness”? Go crazy from the eternal days of night?

  “We need to do something about the kids upstairs,” he says. “I think she hits the kids. While you were gone, there was a big fight up there. I think we should report her to social services and let them check it out.”

  We spend the rest of the morning at a social services office in town, filing a report and talking to a social worker. I can’t wait to get out of there. Here I am, four thousand miles from home, and once again I’m back in a social worker’s office. I wonder if the system is any better over here. The man is nice but seems vague and reticent when we ask him what he intends to do. William and I leave feeling dissatisfied and wary. “Well,” I say, “what more can we do? We reported her. It’s up to the authorities now.”

  The next day, the air is bitterly cold when William and I set out for the Sámi Museum, where I do some of my research. William’s mood has shifted once again. We are both on edge. The night before, the children’s sobbing had woken us up. The mother showed up at our doorstep early that morning, drunk and surly. Someone must have told her that we had reported her to the authorities. She shouted obscenities at us and said we’d be sorry for what we did.

  When we arrive at the museum, the door is open and the place empty. It’s like that here—people leave doors open, offices empty and unguarded. “I hope that man doesn’t show up,” says William, referring to the museum director, a balding man in his fifties. When he’s like this, William is jealous of anyone, even Ristiina. William wipes his fogged-up glasses clean with the special lens cloth he keeps folded neatly in his breast pocket. Before we left Boston, I bought him his glasses. I bought his coat, his boots, his gloves, his hat and socks, his plane ticket to Norway. What was I thinking, that he was a child? He tucks his lens cloth back into his pocket and takes out a notebook and pen.

  “I’m going to draw in the other room,” I say. I feel my neck tightening. Does he have to follow me wherever I go? William finds a spot in a corner to write. I go to a different room and sit on the floor in front of a glass case filled with reindeer shoes from the last three hundred years. Finally I relax. With my pencil, I follow the contour of an eighteenth century shoe of a child. Who wore this little boot? The boy we found in the snow wore shoes just like this one. I remember a Sámi word: ruw’ga, the cry of a reindeer calf when it’s separated from its mother. The shoe makes me think of another artifact taken from a small child. In the fall, right before we moved to Kautokeino, William and I flew to England to see my sister and her husband for a few days. Natalia was on sabbatical while her husband ran their school’s London program.

  One day, when William was sick in bed with the flu, I decided to go draw in a museum. William begged me to stay and take care of him but I pretended I couldn’t hear him and hurried out the door. I took the train to the British Library and began my journey in a room of illuminated manuscripts. Looking up at all those ancient books, I felt at peace, like I was on the shore of a vast and beautiful sea. In another room I found my mother’s favorite book: Alice in Wonderland propped open to the White Rabbit and Alice in a tête-ø-tête, their figures surrounded by Lilliputian waves of hand-printed words. I wandered through the galleries until finally, exhausted, I spied a bench in front of a case of artifacts and sat down.

  I closed my eyes a minute to rest. When I opened them, I noticed a small bone, nestled on a piece of faded red velvet. The label said that it was an oracle bone made from human remains, used for divination in China during the twelfth century. After all its years of use predicting births, deaths, wars, famine, and prosperity, and its second life as a sleeping relic, the bone still glowed white like a pearl. When I took a closer look, I noticed a faint inscription carved into the bone. Later, in a catalogue, I discovered it was the ancient Chinese character for “child.” Had the bone been used to foretell the birth of a child or had someone taken it from a child, offered up as a sacrifice so someone else’s future could be told?

  “I’m ready to go,” says William. I gasp and spin around. I look up at this stranger, my husband, towering above.

  “I just started drawing.”

  “People will come back soon,” says William. “I don’t want to be around when they do.”

  Something is brooding beneath his face. His eyes have that faraway flat look, the kind my mother used to get before an episode. I wonder if, in another time, the Sámi would say that William’s real self had been kidnapped by the Uldat, the hidden people below the earth, and replaced with an evil changeling. The ancient Sámi would have said I needed a magic silver knife, the help of a shaman, and a large herd of reindeer to use as a bargaining chip.

  “I’ll pack up my things,” I say. “I guess I’ll finish this another time.”

  When we get home, there is dog excrement smeared all over our door. In front of our entrance, in the snow, someone has dribbled Americans Go Home in urine. “It’s her,” I say. “We have to report this.”

  “I know,” says William, his face softer now. “This has to stop.”

  In March, the month the Sámi call Njucčkamánnu, the Month of the Swans, we find out that although we have made several calls to social services, they still hav
e not paid the woman upstairs a visit. But somehow she knows about our reports. News travels fast in this town. One afternoon we forget to lock the door and she barges into our apartment drunk and screaming. We finally get her out and head down to the social worker’s office once again. He apologizes for the delay. They will certainly look into the matter soon. “If you don’t,” William warns, “something really bad is going to happen and you’ll be responsible.”

  In April, the Month of Hard Snow, Cčuokamánnu, it is even more difficult for the reindeer to find food. The surface of the snow is too frozen to dig through in many places. Things are hard for humans as well—the light in April is blinding, bouncing off the bright white ground. Neither William nor I can sleep. And the woman upstairs stays up all night partying. Her parties spill out into the streets, even though the temperature rarely gets above fifteen degrees. As the woman’s behavior worsens, William’s does as well. He spends more and more time locked up inside. If I say something to him he snaps back. If I get a letter from a male friend, he throws it in my face, saying, “Why don’t you just go fuck the guy when you get back home?” I try to skip out of the house early in the morning before he wakes up.

  One day he announces, “I don’t want to go back to America. I want us to find a cabin somewhere on the tundra and stay.”

  “I thought you hated it here. And, besides, who’s going to fund your idea? My money runs out in May.”

  “I don’t get it. All you care about is money.”

  “What’s not to get? It’s simple. You refuse to work and I pay for everything.”

  “I’m a poet! How dare you?”

  “Even Walt Whitman had to eat.”

  We don’t talk for two days, but then one night his mood shifts and I find him in the kitchen, cheerfully making pizza. He tells me he wants to go out to Kru’s afterward for dessert. But during dinner, we hear someone pounding on our door. I crack the door open, thinking maybe it’s the police. The blond woman and a dark-haired heavyset man with a knife burst in. Both are drunk. Apparently, social services had finally come to call. From her garbled shouting I realize that she has to appear in court the next month. I grab my cell phone, run to the bathroom, and lock myself in, while William pushes past the two intruders to go next door for help. It’s January 1990 all over again.